July / August 2012 Lite Challenge Entry: The City of Trovesport, Jewel of the Crown

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Elevation contours added, and starting to sketch out the locations of the major fortifications. I need to make the scale more consistent; the river should be wider. And the contours need to be adjusted... not entirely natural-looking as they are now.

Refined the rough-layout of the city districts, and added rough layout of the countryside:

### Latest WIP ###

Originally Posted by atpollard

Should the land get darker as it rises and the water become darker as it gets deeper?

That's how most modern maps are. But I've always liked the effect I've seen on some antique maps where the saturation is greatest on the coastline (my guess is that the reason was to use less ink. But the look seemed appropriate for this map.)

Edited to add: while working on buildings for the seaward-facing slope by the river-- I noticed that the river is just sort of floating on top of the contours. Yes, it's flowing down, but it hasn't carved any sort of bed for itself. Next step: fix the contours so that the surface water is a little less literally "surface" water.

While waiting for the July/August Lite challenge to begin, I was experimenting with trying to get a more intuitive feel for using bezier curves, and playing around with contour maps. So that kind of carried over into my challenge entry